Summary

The limousine continues to move slowly down the street with Eric and Vija as passengers, and protesters begin to fill the streets. They appear to be protesting capitalism and economic exploitation of the disadvantaged. Vija states that the protesters are themselves a product of capitalism. She says, “These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market…There is no outside” (90). She states of the demonstrations, “This is a protest against the future” (91). She wonders what the protesters would do if they knew that Eric, the head of Packer Capital, was in the limousine. On one of the large television screens on a nearby building, two messages appear: “A specter is haunting the world—the specter of capitalism” and “A rat became the unit of currency” (96). Eric recognizes the first line as an alteration of the first...